My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder

This is a really informative and inspiring article.

It has been 6 months (not 6 years) since I quit my full-time job as a Rust developer to start my own business.

As time goes by, I can feel the pressure of mortgage and car loans, and I can also feel the care and pressure of my family.

My original plan was to make a new IDE for Glicol (https://glicol.org), and to develop relevant hardware with firmware written in rust for school education.

I sent some cold emails to VCs, but most of them got no reply.

I also sent an email to the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, offering to perform for children for free, but they didn’t reply for two months. I shamelessly sent it again, and someone finally replied with a rejection.

Only one VC talked to me and thought that I should convince and validate a partner first, and he suggested that I go to an incubator.

Very good advice.

Later I learned that even Norwegian education startups skipped Norway and focused directly on the US market.

People from the incubator also told me that it is impossible for Norwegian schools to accept new things independently.

This is very enlightening to me because most of Glicol's visitors are indeed from the US. And it took me so long to discover this fact.

But if I don’t start, I’ll never get past those six months.

A deceased friend and I tried something like glicol in the mid-80's. We hacked a different crystal oscillator on a Zilog SCC board design donated by our employer to make a MIDI interface. My friend coded 'lxm', Language for the eXpression of Music. My job was to 'mxl', Musically eXpressed Language - to capture from the Juno 106 we were developing with. We weren't able to market it at that time. For your project, maybe find a US-based partner, there are plenty of Magnet and Charter Schools that can independently develop curriculum for non-core subjects. A possible way in is to find ones with a PTO (not PTA), the parents can drive this sort of thing. PTOs are independent corporations that serve one or a few schools whereast PTA is a top-down org and they are not the place to try to drive innovation IMO.

The way I think about investors, they are an extremely high interest loan. I have a money partner in my startup, I negotiated his equity down to 70% from the 80% he wanted. So if this product hits (already have a regular customer) and makes a million, he'll get $700K for investing less than $100K. I'll get $300K for investing probably about $300K worth of my own time and hand half of that to the IRS. Balance that with keeping 100% of $0 = $0.